This chapter examines the earliest natural rights theories in order to analyse philosophical connections between natural and human rights, concerning: scepticism, metaphysical dualism, and the authority of rights. First, the chapter studies Albert the Great’s principles of right and how he understood nature to be reason. Next, analysis of the main tenets of Henry of Ghent’s metaphysics, and his exposition of the soul’s property over one’s body, show that Neoplatonist dualism was fundamental in the development of the first natural rights theories. The philosophical solution to the poverty controversy, of human beings’ natural rights to use material goods, that Hervaeus Natalis proposed became the law of the Church when the Pope incorporate it in the bull, Cum inter nonnullos (1323). Hervaeus continued the metaphysical dualism of Henry and argued that natural rights endowed reality with normativity and hence authority. The chapter concludes by relating this intellectual history to contemporary rights theories. Natural and human rights are identified as a form of public reason that sometimes assists, other times substitutes for, individual right reason and judgement about morality.

This book revives a contested moment in the history of aesthetic theory when Romantic-period writers exploit the growing awareness of irresolutions in Kant’s third Kritik, especially in his critique of judgements of the sublime. Read with hindsight, these openings can be seen to have generated literary opportunities for writings that explicitly embraced the philosophical significance delegated to the aesthetic by Kant, but then took advantage of the licence he had conceded. Romantic writing claimed a wider significance of its own that philosophy now had to learn to rationalise. Consequent aesthetic reorientations, in which splendours and miseries become interchangeable, reflect political instabilities already exploited by feminist and nationalist writing. Falling becomes a kind of rising, and literature’s unregulated power of metamorphosis persuasively challenges hierarchies of all kinds, including its own.

Plato’s philosophical thinking begins from views and assumptions that he presupposes in his readers or in himself, whether or not he states them explicitly. This chapter surveys the following influences: (1) Homer. (2) Political developments and the moral questions they raise. (3) The interactions of natural philosophy (‘Presocratic’ philosophy) and religion. (4) The epistemological questions arising from natural philosophy. (5) Sceptical tendencies in naturalist epistemology. (6) Sophistic and rhetoric and the intellectual and political tensions connected with them. (7) Plato’s reactions to natural philosophy, sophistic and rhetoric. (8) Socratic inquiry and its sources in drama and forensic oratory.

Overview of the main issues in Galen's scientific epistemology , the state of the art, and the contents of this volume.

This chapter examines the change in the fortunes of Galen that began to occur at the time when Aristotle was beginning to be recognised as the supreme ancient authority in the Arabic world, eventually eclipsing the reputation of Galen, at least as a philosopher. It shows how Galen’s pre-eminence as a philosophical authority was gradually undermined by a sequence of commentators on his great work of scientific method, On Demonstration. Its main focus is on al-Rāzī’s Doubts about Galen composed in order to bolster Galen’s reputation when it was beginning to be challenged, notably by al-Fārābī. Central to al-Rāzī’s (partial) defence is an endorsement of Galen’s strong, Aristotelian notion of a demonstrative empirical science, as well as of his rejection of mere induction and argument from example as appropriate means of arriving at the requisite axiomatic principles. However, al-Rāzī takes Galen to task for failing to observe his own distinctions, and for taking insufficient care to ground his own fundamental assumptions. Al-Rāzī then applies his modified Galenian method to theological arguments, notably design-arguments, and in order to reject supposedly fallacious materialists’ arguments against creation. The article then turns to al-Fārābī, who in contrast directly attacks Galen’s inferential methods to support contrary, Aristotelian, positions.

Plato’s philosophical writings have over the centuries evoked widely differing styles of response. Platonist metaphysical systems have been created, as by his first successors in the Academy, down to Plotinus and later Neoplatonists and beyond; while the questioning spirit they evince was what fuelled the scepticism of Arcesilaus and Carneades in the Hellenistic period, and what most impressed James Mill and George Grote, the nineteenth-century British ‘Philosophical Radicals’. Both types of response agreed, however, in rejecting what the dialogues call ‘opinion’, the metaphysicians because it lacks the security and clarity of true knowledge, the sceptics and radicals because it leaves prevailing norms unquestioned. They all took from Plato the precept: Think for yourself, whatever opinion or the prevailing norms may be. And from the beginning they disagreed among themselves too, with Speusippus, Plato’s nephew and his successor as head of the Academy, already rejecting the dialogues’ theory of transcendent Forms. Where the theory was embraced, it was developed further than its originator ever did himself or perhaps could have done. Plato wrote for eternity, to open minds and encourage independent thought in any reader, whatever their historical circumstances.

A study of James Mill’s engagement with Plato. It focuses on two hostile reviews of Thomas Taylor’s Neoplatonist Plato, one published by him in 2004 in The Literary Journal, a short-lived periodical that he himself edited, and another in 2009 in The Edinburgh Review, a much more prestigious and enduring forum of opinion, for which he wrote regularly for some years. It celebrates Mill as a pioneer, who had the good fortune to make his first approach to Plato from the vantage point of the scepticism of Cicero’s Academica, and very likely exerted influence on the interpretation of Plato in George Grote’s great study of 1865, which portrays an exploratory thinker, not a system builder.

In this chapter five main themes emerge with respect to the historiographical side of Grotius' works: (1) the polarity between constitutionalism and patriotism on the one hand, and reason of state and Scepticism on the other; (2) Grotius’ ‘secularising’ reading of history; (3) the close correlation between scholarship and politics; (4) Grotius’ use of sources and his relation to contemporary developments in Antiquarianism; and (5) the important role of historical perspectives in his other works such as De Jure Belli and the Annotationes on the New Testament.

Connecting sociability with arguments about self-interest and natural law, Grotius adopted an account of moral knowledge and motivation for justice that he found in Cicero. For Grotius, sociability serves as a counter to Epicurean views of moral motivation, but it does not by itself provide the grounds of validity of natural law, nor does it alone ground the obligatory force of natural law. Rather, sociability represents an appeal to a basis in human nature for cooperation in the state of nature. Human beings according to Grotius can be motivated to cooperate and adhere to the rules of natural law, but they are not necessarily so motivated. Importantly, Grotius appreciates that sociability creates its own problems, which Grotius believes can be solved by reason alone. For Grotius, the basis of sociability in human nature is not merely instinctual, but also rational; sociability is ultimately based on a respect for the rights to ‘first things’ such as private property, a respect which itself is motivated by right reason. The notion of sociability was to have an important future in the works of later thinkers such as Hobbes, Pufendorf, Shaftesbury, Mandeville, Hutcheson, Hume, Smith and Kant.

This chapter looks at the future of people assessment. Like many other areas of business there have been many, and rapid, technology-led changes. There are questions about who are or should be assessed; when and how they are assessed; the cost and legal changes in assessment; and how data is stored. The quiet world of academic-led assessment and testing has been ‘invaded’ by people in business eager to sell psychological testing and assessment to a much larger market. Inevitably there are enthusiasts and sceptics: the former claiming how AI computer and neuro-science technology will revolutionise the ease, cost and accuracy of assessment, while the sceptics argue there is still very little evidence for these claims. It certainly is a ‘good time to be alive’ for those interested in people assessment.

Francis Gentleman recorded that David Garrick’s performance of Thomas Otway's Jaffeir ‘beggars description, by an amazing variety of transitions, tones and picturesque attitudes’. I use Gentleman's commentary to introduce here the concept of transition with respect to three things: theatrical practice, theories of the passions, and the eighteenth-century understanding of the mind in wonder. My argument throughout is that the identification of transitions leads to simultaneous recognition of the iconic and dynamic qualities of an object.

At Against the Mathematicians (M) 2.10 Sextus Empiricus defines technê along Stoic lines, as (a) an organized system of knowledge (b) directed towards an end useful for life. This raises a question. Does the sceptic’s own art satisfy conditions (a) and (b) and thereby qualify as a technê? This is not an idle question. For if it turns out that the sceptic’s art does qualify as a technê, then one might reasonably ask whether, on pain of inconsistency, Sextus ought not to train his guns on the sceptic’s art just as he trains his guns on the liberal arts of grammar, rhetoric, geometry, arithmetic, astrology and music in M 1–6. The chapter explore the different possible answers that can be given to the question and argues that, though scepticism satisfies condition (b) for a technê, it fails to satisfy condition (a). While skepticism has eudaimonistic use, in that establishes ‘unperturbedness’ (ataraxia), not fixed target or subject matter like technai proper, but one that changes according to dialectical context. Skeptic art has then an asystematic subject matter. Scepticism is, therefore, a non-technical art that differs fundamentally from the kinds of technai Sextus discusses, and attacks, in M 1–6.

Sextus Empiricus brings his discussion of the so-called ‘liberal arts’ (Math. 1–6) to a close by attacking the epistemic and therapeutic pretences of a would-be science of musicology. He presents two kinds of arguments that bring about and preserve a state of suspension of judgement about the claims of those who profess knowledge in this domain. First, he borrows material from Epicureans purporting to establish that expertise in matters of music holds no prospects for a happy life. Second, he argues that fundamental notions of music theory do not correspond to anything in reality, and thus that the science itself does not exist. The emerging Sextan critique of musicology provides an interesting angle on the Pyrrhonian project as well as on Sextus’ authorial methods. In this paper, I present the agenda of the treatise as being compatible with Pyrrhonism as described in Sextus’ Outlines (Section 1), discuss the arguments employed by Sextus (Sections 2–4), and argue that the treatise does not support readings according to which his treatment of music requires Sextus to abandon the suspensive stance (Section 5).

This chapter not only explores the efflorescence of ‘new’ visions that occurred, especially, but not only, in the British Isles, during the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries, it also traces the reproduction of early medieval visions too, arguing that the slow evolution of ‘purgatory’ from early medieval origins facilitated their continued use. Change is nonetheless to be found in this period. There was renewed sensitivity to old anxieties about the authenticity of visions. There was a fresh flux of debate about conceptualisations of the afterlife that were so strongly material. And, most especially, new theological and pastoral priorities were imprinted on vision-texts, which were subtly reshaped by shifting thinking about penitence and prayer. The chapter examines some of the most ‘popular’ visions, measured in terms of manuscript circulation, but it also reconstructs something of the range of visionary experiences too, taking into account narratives that were little attended in their day.

This chapter traces the history of the Scottish school of common-sense philosophy from c.1720 to 1828. It begins by examining the teaching of George Turnbull and his fellow regents at Marischal College, Aberdeen, in order to shed light on the early philosophical development of the so-called founder of the school, Thomas Reid. It next analyses the evolution of Reid’s critique of Humean scepticism and the theory of ideas in the years preceding the publication of his An Inquiry into the Human Mind, on the Principles of Common Sense (1764). Reid’s appeal to common sense is then compared and contrasted with those of James Beattie and James Oswald, whose writings, along with Reid’s Inquiry, were attacked by Joseph Priestley and other critics in the 1770s. Following a consideration of Reid’s response to Priestley in his Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (1785), the chapter discusses Dugald Stewart’s reformulation of Reid’s conception of common sense and his genealogy of the Scottish school of philosophy. Lastly it charts the collapse of the common-sense school around the time of Stewart’s death in 1828.

What role does ordinary-language philosophy play in the defence of common-sense beliefs? J. L. Austin and Ludwig Wittgenstein each give central place to ordinary language in their responses to sceptical challenges to common-sense beliefs. But Austin and Wittgenstein do not always respond to such challenges in the same way, and their working methods are different. This chapter compares Austin’s and Wittgenstein’s metaphilosophical positions and shows that they share many metaphilosophical commitments. It then examines Austin’s and Wittgenstein’s respective takes on the problem of other minds and the problem of our knowledge of the external world. Interestingly, we find Wittgenstein employing methods more frequently associated with Austin and vice versa. Moreover, we find that a variety of defences of common-sense beliefs are compatible with ordinary-language philosophy.

The common-sense tradition holds that among the things we know are various facts about the external world and some epistemic facts – for example, that we know there are other people, that people know their names, and that we know that they know their names. This chapter makes two claims. First, that the common-sense tradition should include among the things known various common-sense moral claims as well as various particular moral claims that are no less evident. Second, that these moral claims are more reasonable to believe than any philosophical view that implies either that they are false or that we do not know them. In short, it suggests that the common-sense philosopher should treat some moral claims as having the same weight as some epistemic claims and claims about the external world. The last three sections consider some philosophical objections to this view. These include the objections that no evaluative claims are true or false, that we cannot know particular moral claims without knowing some general moral criterion, and that the appeal to our moral intuitions is illegitimate in philosophical inquiry.